![]() ![]() Quite the opposite: Rancière identifies this pending quality as commensurate with a politics of emancipation precisely because the “not yet” allows for momentum without the promise of any outcome. Nor does the circular motion of the clock hands represent for him a vision of history cycling through periodic changes and reversals. By no means does he dramatize revolution as imminent or inevitable, however. It is this pending, “not yet” aspect of the temporal revolution that Rancière perversely argues is so politically radical. ![]() In this series of intervals, the time of revolution neither arrives nor passes but is instead always “pending.” The revolutions themselves are marked out in intervals, in the silences between each instant-made-audible, in the suspended animation separating each movement-made-visible. Each instant is defined as much by its distance from all other instants as by the inexorable continuity of points in time that together constitute time. The mechanical work of the clock has no origin, no terminus point, no urgent climax – it whirls around and around, and in its discrete ticking, it renders the flow of time perceptible to ears and eyes. The clock hands spin on their fixed axis, pirouetting like virtuosic dancers, always in motion, each small gyration generating another, a mechanism whose workings have Kantian “purposiveness without any purpose.” Seconds and minutes spiral out infinitely, with each rotation circling back but never quite returning to the same moment. 1600-1610 (Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art) 1 – Clock Watch, Movement by Michael Nouwen (or Nouen), Flemish, ca. ![]()
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